New York Tops Other States in Value of Foundation Assets

Foundations in New York State control more in assets than those in any other state, according to a new Foundation Center report. The main reason is the share of funds held by foundations in metropolitan New York City, which by themselves are worth more than the assets of foundations in any of the 49 other states.

Foundations in the city also give away more money and are more numerous than their counterparts in other states.

In 2000, foundations in the New York metropolitan area held almost 17 percent of the assets of all foundations in the United States and distributed close to 18 percent of all the money awarded, according to the report by the Foundation Center, a national group in New York that promotes public understanding about philanthropy. The metropolitan area studied by the center includes eight counties in and around New York City.

Foundations in California, which experienced the greatest growth in assets during the 1990s, followed New York in assets and giving.

In part because of an economic boom that benefited financial-services institutions in the New York area, the report said, assets of New York-area foundations more than doubled from 1992 to 2000, to more than $82-billion, and giving rose at the same pace, to $4.8-billion in 2000. The nation’s now-shaky economy and the impact of the September 11 terrorist attacks will limit the growth of the metropolitan area’s foundations, the report said.

Still, it predicted, New York foundations will remain the wealthiest for the foreseeable future, in part because thousands of grant-making organizations that were started there since the early 1990s are expected to become fully endowed over the next 10 to 15 years.

New York foundations place a slightly different emphasis on the types of groups they support than grant makers based elsewhere do, the study found. In 2000, foundations in New York and the rest of the country alike gave the largest share of their support to education. New York-area foundations made arts and culture their second priority, however, while foundations in the United States taken as a whole gave their second largest share of support to health organizations.

Copies of “New York Metropolitan Area Foundations: A Profile of the Grantmaking Community” are available for $24.95 at http://www.fdncenter.org/marketplace, or by calling (800) 424-9836. Orders can also be mailed, with prepayment plus $4.50 for shipping and handling, to the Foundation Center, Department LS, 79 Fifth Avenue, New York 10003-3076. Highlights of the report are available free at http://www.fdncenter.org/research.